Wrapped
by tamsinmouse
Summary: Engaged and losing her sanity after the Battle of Hogwarts, Ginny gives in to her most wicked feelings against Harry. Inspired by Dark Swan from Once Upon a Time.


_You cry out in your sleep_  
 _All my failings exposed_  
 _And there's a taste in my mouth_  
 _As desperation takes hold_

\- "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division

* * *

Ginny's lips felt raw from a day without water, waking up in the dark of their empty cottage with no Harry to be seen. Her engagement ring was loose around her finger and her clothes ill-fitting - what was this now, month three after the Battle? Ginny dry swallowed and shuffled from the sofa to the kitchen tap, sticking her mouth in its cold stream and then her entire face. Its coldest setting stung her cheeks like a slap. _Fuck Harry for leaving me here_.

Shock had brought them together in the first weeks after the Battle, too wide-eyed and alert to be anything other than grateful for each other, their grief lessened by splitting it between them. The proposal felt so right at the time but now made her hands curl into fists at the sight of him. How fucking dare he make that summer about them and call it "hopeful". She dreamt of sharpening her nail to a point and pressing it into his arm, stabbing through flesh and fat and muscle to make him pained and bloodied. " _I'll be at the pub."_ She'd rang their local every time and he had never stayed there for long, but Harry was gone hours. The gut-wrenching sadness of what they'd both lost that May had come to them about the same time that summer. Harry gave her a stiff peck twice each day, and shrunk away from her hands and her love. Ginny hated how little it'd taken to sour her to him, but the grief - the real grief - wrapped itself around her like Devil's Snare and she no longer tried to fight for their future.

It was only turning on a lamp that she saw Harry sleeping upright, slumped in an armchair like a posed memento mori. He was breathing softly and hadn't seemed to wake from all her stomping around. Ginny closed her eyes and saw the green flashes that were always, always there. Without thinking, she slunk back to the sofa and picked up her wand, pointing it at Harry. " _Hedera strangularus_."

Like a gun, a wand is not an intimate weapon.

If Ginny were a coward she could've stood at the other side of the room and been just as effective, but she chose to move closer. A delicate tendril of ivy curled around Harry's ankle, licking at his trouser leg and tightening up his calf. She sat on the floor in front of him, looking up, observing. Ginny plumped her lips and blew on his other leg, and the ivy sprouted a double.

Harry was still asleep. Who knows where he'd gone all day or when he'd come back. _Grow_. The ropes of ivy stopped at the top of his thighs, hesitant.

"Keep going," she cooed.

The green pressed itself into him, snaking up his torso and annoyingly ending at his shoulders. She was rapt with attention. She wanted to touch the damp ivy all over him, but only hovered her hands. She got up from the floor and leaned over him, her breath hot on his neck. _More_.

The spell was an extension of Ginny, needing only a nod of encouragement to wind tight 'round his neck. But she wanted to pause. Just for a minute. Ginny ran to the bathroom and like a cliche, stared at herself intensely in the mirror.

 _When did he stop loving me?_

When she went back to the living room, Harry was awake.

* * *

"Is there a reason I'm tied up with plants?" said Harry, a note of humour among the anger.

Ginny stiffened. "Where's your wand?"

Harry tilted his head to the small table beside the armchair. "Could I please _have_ it?"

She hated that calm, condescending tone. He never used to speak to her like she was a lesser witch.

"I'm so tired of this, Harry," she said. Then suddenly, "Where do you go for all those hours after the pub?"

He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

"I'll tell you... when you loosen the vines."

Ginny's wand snapped up and she cried out a spell for more - but the ivy didn't grow. _An extension of me_.

Greedily, she straddled over Harry's lap and ran a hand up his shoulders, until... his neck. The leaves thickened and curled where she dragged her nail, and Harry's eyes grew wide. Wickedly lush leaves grew from the vine with every kiss to his skin, her sucking and nibbling up his jaw. She laughed with her lips pressed onto him, smelling the concern, confusion, and white-hot rage he was sweating out. Ginny wasn't positive, but she thought she felt him grow hard under her crotch. In spite of everything, his body still responded to her. She felt sickened with herself and stepped off.

It was with that bit of distance that she saw how red his face was. Part anger, most definitely, but the strained look of a choking victim who can't cough up the food. Ginny ran to the kitchen drawer for scissors.

Harry's forehead was purple when she cut at the vines. Thick, unyielding, life-draining vines that braided themselves into a noose and didn't want to be spelled away or cut. But the scissors finally broke through, and Harry gasped. The other coils loosened and fell from him as he stood, him grabbing his wand and pointing it at her. His fingers looked itchy to use it. His mouth twitched with anticipation to hex her.

"Do it!" yelled Ginny, her own wand at the ready.

They stood like that, squared off in some wizard Spaghetti Western.

"I'm just wondering why the _hell_ my fiancee tried to murder me in my sleep!" said Harry.

Ginny shot a purposely clumsy beam of red too far from Harry's arm. " _Expelliarmus_!"

" _Genu rescindus_!"

She wailed in agony as her knees reversed to the back of her legs and collapsed in contortion; the screams kept coming. Harry took her wand and shoved it in his back pocket, standing directly over her. He glanced at a stone charm on his bracelet and his eyebrows furrowed deeply.

"Jesus Christ, you're not even under a curse right now?!" said Harry. "Just tried to kill me of your _own free will_ , Gin?"

Ginny was in too much pain to do anything but howl.

" _Rescindus_." Harry snapped her knees back into place.

She scrambled to her feet the best she could, still wobbly and animalistic.

"Where do you go?" she yelled.

"Not exactly priority conversation, love!"

She kept pushing it. "Where!"

"You're not this girl, Ginny. You're acting like you've been body snatched, but it's just you. You really think I'm cheating? That I have a drink at our local and go plot ways to hurt you?" said Harry.

"I just want to know why you stopped loving me!" she said.

Harry looked taken aback.

"How could you think that? Seriously. How?"

"You haven't looked me in the eye for two months. You flinch when I try to hold you. I've done everything I can to try to talk and you've shrugged them all off," said Ginny. "Please, just take the fucking ring back so I can stop feeling this mad."

She tossed the diamond underhand and Harry caught it sadly.

"I spend hours using a Pensieve - _alone_ ," he said. "That's where I go. Merlin, Ginny! Of course I never stopped loving you."

Ginny paused.

"You know they're never coming back, Harry, not a single one," she said, tears prickling up.

Harry breathed deeply.

"People have gone mad from using Pensieves; no reality can compete with a loop of perfect memories. _I_ can't compete with who you're visiting back then," said Ginny.

"It's gotten harder to move between memories and reality," he said.

"We can't both self-destruct and stay together," said Ginny. "The horrible things we've been through aren't going away, but you're not really in this with me, not as you are. I _strangled_ you, Harry, and you broke my bloody legs. We need proper help."

Ginny saw his panic and knew he'd thought of Frank and Alice Longbottom. She used it.

"We. did. not. come out of that Battle just to end up perma-fried in St. Mungo's. That's us if we don't do something now. St. Mungo's - the other wards - have healers we can see," she said.

Harry took Ginny's wand from his back pocket and handed it to her. He'd stopped being cautious, either trusting her with magic again or out of cavalier disregard for his safety. Since May, neither of them had felt much like Gryffindors. That loss hurt too much and they no longer stood for anything.

"What about the ring?" said Harry.

"It's not important right now. Us, leaving is the only thing that matters," she said.

He set down Ginny's engagement ring on the coffee table.

"Okay. Let's go to St. Mungo's," said Harry.


End file.
